Fire Walk With Me

mark-my-wordss:

“I’m sick and tired of seeing these victims trotted out, given rides on Air Force One, hauled into the Senate well, and everyone is terrified of these victims,” Bob Davis, part of the “Davis and Emmer” show on KTCN, said in his vicious April 12 diatribe. “I would stand in front of them and tell them, ‘Go to hell!’”

“Just because a bad thing happened to you, doesn’t mean that you get to put a king in charge of my life. I’m sorry that you suffered a tragedy. But you know what? Deal with it, and don’t force me to lose my liberty, which is a greater tragedy than your loss,” Davis said.

Sometimes I think this country will heal someday and then I hear people like Bob Davis telling the families of the Newtown shootings to go to hell and saying that having to do background checks for a gun is worse than losing a child, and I change my mind.

stfuapologists:

fuckyeahfeminists:

This is what the school-to-prison pipeline looks like. This is how black youth criminalized.

1. She was doing a science experiment
2. She’s being charged as an ADULT
3. She’s being charged with a FELONY

If this all goes the way the prosecution wants, this young woman will be LEGALLY discriminated against for the rest of her life. No voting, housing discrimination,  employment discrimination (as if getting a job while black isn’t hard enough), etc. etc.

Here’s the thing: even if she was just fucking around and it made an accidental little bang (the description makes it sound like diet coke and mentos at the worst) she’s a kid. Sixteen years old. She doesn’t deserve prison. She doesn’t even deserve a trial. Give her a detention, maybe charge her if she broke something.

agh, schools these days

(via panasonicyouth)

His hunger strike is approaching its seventieth day. He is beyond the point where experts say “irreversible cognitive impairment and psychological damage” can result yet British prisoner Shaker Aamer, who has been detained without charge or trial in the Guantanamo Bay prison camps for eleven years, remains committed to resistance.

The Observer in the United Kingdom has published an op-ed he wrote from prison. He writes, “I’ve never been charged with any crime. I’ve never been allowed to see the evidence that the US once pretended they had against me. It’s all secret, even the statements they tortured out of me.”

He describes:

“Every day in Guantánamo is torture – as was the time they held me before that, in Bagram and Kandahar air force bases, in Afghanistan. It’s not really the individual acts of abuse (the strappado – that’s the process refined by the Spanish Inquisition where they hang you from your wrists so your shoulders begin to dislocate, the sleep deprivation, and the kicks and punches); it’s the combined experience. My favourite book here (I’ve read it over and over) has been Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell: torture is for torture, and the system is for the system”.

His political consciousness, however, prevents him from being willing to beg for mercy, end his hunger strike and accept what the system is doing to him.

“More than a decade of my life has been stolen from me, for no good reason,” Aamer declares. “I resent that; of course I do. I have missed the birth of my youngest son, and some of the most wonderful years with all my four children. I love being a father, and I always worked to do it as best I can.”

He wants to go home to London, but states, “I am never going to beg. If I have to die here, I want my children to know that I died for a principle, without bowing to my abusers.”

Clive Stafford Smith, lawyer and executive director for the UK-based legal charity, Reprieve, shares that Aamer, who is “widely regarded as a robust and resourceful character, has started to raise the possibility that he might die inside Guantánamo Bay.” He has asked Smith to “brief” his wife “that he might not make it out alive after all.” [READ]

(via themindislimitless)

goforthandagitate:

Last year in Norristown, Pa., Lakisha Briggs’ boyfriend physically assaulted her, and the police arrested him. But in a cruel turn of events, a police officer then told Ms. Briggs, “You are on three strikes. We’re gonna have your landlord evict you.”

Yes, that’s right. The police threatened Ms. Briggs with eviction because she had received their assistance for domestic violence. Under Norristown’s “disorderly behavior ordinance,” the city penalizes landlords and tenants when the police respond to three instances of “disorderly behavior” within a four-month period. The ordinance specifically includes “domestic disturbances” as disorderly behavior that triggers enforcement of the law.

After her first “strike,” Ms. Briggs was terrified of calling the police. She did not want to do anything to risk losing her home. So even when her now ex-boyfriend attacked her with a brick, she did not call. And later, when he stabbed her in the neck, she was still too afraid to reach out. But both times, someone else did call the police. Based on these “strikes,” the city pressured her landlord to evict. After a housing court refused to order an eviction, the city said it planned to condemn the property and forcibly remove Ms. Briggs from her home. The ACLU intervened, and the city did not carry out its threats, and even agreed to repeal the ordinance. But just two weeks later, Norristown quietly passed a virtually identical ordinance that imposes fines on landlords unless they evict tenants who obtain police assistance, including for domestic violence.

….. SERIOUSLY?!

empressfab:

I just want to take a moment to be really fucking angry about people being really fucking irresponsible and insensitive and awful on the internet.

This is Sunil Tripathi. He is a) a student at Brown University, b) a person of South Asian descent (his name is Hindu), and c)…

barbeauxbot:

think-progress:

It’s worse than we thought…

Warnings for police abuse, ableism, homophobia. This is important to read if you can.